Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [43]
George sat down to talk with me in the remodeled Truman booth. A lifetime of diner food clearly had not affected him adversely. He was fifty-seven but looked at least a dozen years younger. He spoke with the accent common to this part of Maryland. “Power” becomes “pyre.” “The Princess” is “the prince’s.”
George is the middle of three children. Neither his older sister nor his younger brother ever evinced much interest in the restaurant business, but George was fascinated by it from the start. When he was in the first grade he would come into the Princess every morning at five, just to “hang out” until it was time to go to school at eight. He went to work at the restaurant full time in 1969. His father paid him the minimum wage: $1.30 an hour.
I asked George if he was a “damn good Democrat” like Truman said his grandfather was. He laughed in a way that indicated he was not.
“Granddad and I talked about a lot of things, but we never talked about politics,” he told me. George said he thought taxes were too high, and that the government made it too hard to run a small business like the Princess. He complained, for example, that his soda fountain license cost more than his restaurant license (twenty-five dollars vs. ten dollars), even though his might be the last soda fountain in Allegany County.
Besides, George explained, most of his friends are Republicans, and if he wanted to vote for them in a primary election, he had to be a Republican too, since Maryland’s primaries are closed. (In 2008 the McCain-Palin ticket carried the county with 62 percent of the vote.)
Of all the small mom-and-pop businesses that the Trumans are known to have patronized on their trip, the Princess Restaurant on Main Street in Frostburg is the only one I found that has survived, more or less intact, in the same family. “Granddad was a hard worker and a thinker,” said George. “In 1949 he decided to stop selling beer to attract the ‘church crowd.’ Beer was a nuisance anyway. Business went up immediately.” George says his father was no less diligent. “They were both hard workers and they’d give you a good meal for a good price.”
When the Trumans came to Frostburg in 1953, Main Street positively bustled with businesses, including Durst Furniture, Prichard’s Hardware, Maurice’s Department Store, Hohing’s Men’s and Boys’ Store, a G. C. Murphy’s five and dime, a Rexall, an Acme, and an A&P Besides the Princess there were a dozen other places to get a meal, ranging from drugstore soda fountains to white tablecloth restaurants: Al’s, Bob’s, Boney’s, the Duchess, Finzel’s, Peck’s. On Friday nights, coal miners from all over the county would bring their families to Main Street for dinner and a movie, to do a little shopping, or just to hang out. It could get a little raucous sometimes. It was what they did for entertainment.
Today, all those businesses are gone. Except for the Princess.
George took me outside. Standing in front of the restaurant, he pointed to a vacant building across the street.
“That used to be the five and dime,” he said.
“And that”—he pointed to another vacant building down the street—“used to be the furniture store.” There were at least five vacant storefronts on a three-block stretch of Main Street.
What happened? Lots of things. Highway 40 was rerouted around the town, siphoning traffic from Main Street. Then Interstate 68 was built, siphoning even more. A mall opened down the road in LaVale, followed by a Wal-Mart Supercenter and other big-box stores.
But there were less obvious factors. Technological advances made it easier to mine coal from the surface, which is cheaper than underground mining—and requires far fewer workers. Before Frostburg knew it, Friday nights on Main Street were a lot less boisterous.
Furthermore, many of the businesses on Main Street were family-owned, and, as George W. Pappas well knew, it can be hard to keep a family-owned business in the family. He gestured toward the vacant building where Prichard’s, the hardware store, used to be. “The grandkids, they went up to Penn State.